


After the Flight (The Meaning of Home)

by CassieWritesDestiel



Series: Storm [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Angel Wings, Canon Related, Canon Universe, Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Castiel Won't Leave, Dean Winchester Has Abandonment Issues, Dean Winchester Loves Castiel, Dean Winchester is Bad at Feelings, Dean Winchester is Castiel's Home, Destiel - Freeform, Feels, Fluff, Home, M/M, Massage, Poetic, Promises, Sorry guys, Storm - Freeform, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, but that's fine, i should stop tagging random stuff, i think, idk - Freeform, maybe? - Freeform, still pretty platonic, the story wouldn't let me write full on destiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 04:28:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17522009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CassieWritesDestiel/pseuds/CassieWritesDestiel
Summary: Castiel's shoulders are tense after his first flight and Dean helps him out with a massage. Confessions and promises are made.





	After the Flight (The Meaning of Home)

Castiel stared outside with sad eyes and thin lips, watching the soft wind playing and rustling through the leaves. His wings almost shook with despair, wishing he'd replace the leaves with his feathers, eager to feel the cold brush of excitement against his plums again as he flew towards freedom, but the annoying pain in his shoulders reminded him that he couldn’t, not yet. 

“What’s wrong, Cas?” Dean’s voice intruded his thoughts, calming and concerned like a call to home. 

“I can’t fly,” he answered truthfully, deepening the wrinkles in his forehead with an unhappy frown as he finally looked back at the hunter. 

“Shoulders tense?” asked Dean, his eyes pointedly following the slight, rolling movements of the angel’s shoulders. Castiel just nodded. “Then why don’t you just simply mojo it away? Isn’t your grace all healed up?” 

“No,” the angel answered, asserting his eyes, “I’m still partly human, that’s why flying even affects my vessel. Normally it wouldn’t.” 

They stood there for a moment, Dean simply nodding as a sign of understanding, drinking in the silence around them somehow becoming as stiff as Cas’s shoulders. Then, all of the sudden, Dean took action. 

“Here, let me help you,” he whispered and at first, the angel tensed up, not expecting the touch, but his wings remained calm. They knew there was no reason to flee and he knew it was Dean. He fell into the confusing yet comforting fingers on his shoulders, slowly starting to de-knot them. A difficult venture, especially through the thick layers of clothing. 

“What are you doing?” Cas asked, still a bit anxious, turning his head in an attempt to look at Dean’s fingers. 

“Relax, Cas, it’s a massage. You don’t like it?” Fingers started to retreat as Castiel shook his head. 

“It feels… pleasant,” the angel stated and Dean chuckled in response, but then cleared his throat, seemingly uneasy in his next words. 

“It’d be better though without the clothes.” Another turmoil of bewildering emotions washed over Castiel. Lately, ever since his flight actually, Dean was gravitating towards yet avoiding him, his eyes so full of caged in emotions that he didn’t manage to hide them anymore. His soul was whirling around like a storm, indecisive and hesitant. Sometimes, he found reasons to initiate touch, other times he was gone from the room once he entered it. It was like they were two magnets but Dean was constantly switching poles. 

They moved to Dean’s room, it was more comfortable this way for both of them. The air was cold against Castiel’s skin, freezing him with every breath, but that wasn’t what troubled the angel. Dean’s eyes were hanging on his scars, a sign of humanity’s fragility yet strength, but Castiel knew that wasn’t what the hunter saw. He looked at them and felt a stab for every single one of them, confined guilty for making Castiel this vulnerable yet not protecting him enough. 

“Dean?” The angel asked, a sound so full of emotion, a calling for hope like the wheezing and groaning of the Tardis yet darker, more gentle, an ask for home, all in one word. It was enough to draw the hunter’s eyes away from the red and silver marks on his body and make him look up into the endless and pure blue of his eyes. “Are you alright?” 

“Yeah,” Dean slightly shook his head and then nodded, locking all the guilt up again, allowing himself a moment of peace as he looked into the angel’s eyes. To Dean, Cas was so much more than just an angel, he always were. The scars on his skin were hell, a mark of their dangerous life he bore himself, yet Cas shouldn’t. But when he called him like he was home, wrapped his lips around his name with so much love, and Dean looked up to meet his eyes, he found the heaven all the bedtime stories told about. A sometimes troubled heaven, but Dean wouldn’t have it any other way. When clouds darkened the sky he knew it was real.    

“Okay, let’s do this. We don’t wanna cage the bird for too long, right?” He seated himself behind the angel, letting his fingers swiftly trace over the angel’s skin before starting to massage him. Castiel hummed in agreement. 

His wings resonated with the touch, feathers vibrating and caressing Dean, showing trust as they tickled him, slowly fading into visibility. Soon, the dim light in the room was greeted by blue particles floating around, traitors in the half-light, telling a story of how an angel found home so far away from the sky. Dean’s fingers had long since left the angel’s shoulders, wandering over the plums with hesitation and care and awe, almost unworthy of disturbing the beautiful play of cobalt glow on midnight feathers, like a night sky with bright blue stars, shining only for him. 

“What are those lights?” Dean eventually asked, wonder and admiration on his face, an expression he hadn’t worn since his childhood was stolen. 

“The plumage of an angel possesses a glow specific to the angel,” Castiel explained. “Sometimes, when the angel is around someone they especially trust and care for, this glow manifests in those particles. Nobody really knows what they actually are.” 

“They look like fireflies,” Dean stated, but his eyes spoke of a question he was too afraid to ask. Castiel chuckled and agreed before he whispered a little word in Enochian, increasing the expression on Dean’s face. “What was that?”

The angel repeated the word, louder this time. “That’s what they’re called,” he clarified. “It means  _ sparks of emotion _ , which is contradictory since angels aren’t supposed to feel. With the absence of a soul comes the inability to feel, but somehow, emotions found a way into our beings. These fireflies, as you call them, especially respond to strong emotions, but somehow they don’t resonate with hate, which is one of the strongest emotions. Usually, they show when an angel is around someone they,” Castiel made a quick pause, almost unnoticeable to those who didn't know him, “...  _ love. _ Those little traitors.”

Silence surrounded them as Dean’s hand somehow found itself on Cas’s cheek, holding their stare intact as long as Dean found the courage to look at the angel. He opened his mouth to respond but then reconsidered. “I wouldn’t call them traitors,” Dean eventually said. 

“What would you call them?” 

“I don’t know, fireflies for one.” The following silence was only broken by Cas’s brief laugh. There was electricity in the air as they sat there, surrounded by black feathers and blue dots of light, while Dean searched for the courage to ask, his thumb gently caressing the angel’s cheek as he drowned in his colour of hope. “Do you really…?” he started, but couldn’t finish, the words remained stuck in his throat. 

“Yes,” Castiel confirmed, smiling, aware of the long road it would take for Dean to accept that someone could love him. There was a tremor in Dean’s hand and Castiel raised his hand to cover it. The hunter’s eyes were hanging on his wings, fear making its way up front again. 

“Promise me you won’t leave?” he asked, his voice so childlike he hated it but around Cas it wasn’t as bad and embarrassing. 

“I can’t promise you that, Dean,” the angel answered, “But I can promise you that I’ll always come back to you.”

Dean’s smile was mirrored in Cas, both of them engulfed in a weird yet happy feeling, consent with whatever was there between them. “Then don't let me down because I don't wanna wait for nothing,” he answered in a slightly mocking  voice, signalising that Castiel's promise was enough. The magnets finally had found matching, the storm within Dean coming to a rest and his charged particles aligning to point at the angel in front of him. He savored the little laugh drawn from Castiel's throat, but then his eyes hardened with seriousness. “I,” he started, taking a deep breath before continuing, “I need you, Cas. So don't leave me hanging.” 

“I know, Dean. I won't,” Castiel assured him, hoping he was a worthy adversary to Dean's fear. 

Their foreheads met again as they unintentionally leaned forward, always searching the other's closeness, drawn in by a pull like gravity towards each other. A déjà vu of the moment directly after the flight, of another yet same promise that Cas was here and wouldn't leave. Their eyes closed as they shared their air and maybe now their lips met in a clash of hope and they weren't two lovers after a kiss that never happened anymore. 

 


End file.
